Finance / economy

The automation myth: Robots aren't taking your jobs— and that's the problem. President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment.

The M.I.T. Gang. Goodbye, Chicago boys.

Hello, M.I.T. gang. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the term “Chicago boys” was originally used to refer to Latin American economists, trained at the University of Chicago, who took radical free-market ideology back to their home countries.
Explicit cookie consent. WHEN Chinese shares plunged earlier this month, the government tried frantically to limit the damage.

It pumped cash into the market, capped short-selling and ordered share buy-backs. Although China was unusually heavy-handed, it was hardly the first country to try to bolster stock prices for fear of the economic harm a crash could bring. Alan Greenspan, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, famously created the “Greenspan put” by giving investors the impression he would cut interest rates to stop stockmarket routs. The underlying rationale for these interventions is an idea that until recently received surprisingly little scrutiny—namely, that stockmarket busts are very damaging for the economy.

The link seems clear enough in the case of the crash of 1929, which led in short order to the Depression. Not all bubbles, it would appear, are equally bad. That makes sense. What does this mean for central banks?
Banks Forgot Who Was Supposed to Own Dell Shares. Here are three stylized facts about stocks: Nobody owns stock.

What you own is an entitlement to stock held for you by your broker. But your broker doesn't own the stock either.
Algorithms Had Themselves a Treasury Flash Crash. On Monday, U.S. regulators released a long shrug of a report on the Great Treasury Flash Crash of Oct. 15, 2014, when the prices of Treasury bonds shot up between 9:33 and 9:39 a.m. and then shot right back down between 9:39 and 9:45.

The regulators don't know what caused the flash crash. But they do know what stopped it. This is maybe the most emphatic causal claim in the report: Around 9:39 ET, the sudden visibility of certain sell limit orders in the futures market seemed to have coincided with the reversal in prices. Recall that only 10 levels of order prices above and below the best bid and ask price are visible to futures market participants. People (algorithms) who trade Treasury futures can see all the bids and offers to buy and sell Treasury futures at prices close to the current price.
The Biggest Tech Problems So Obvious We Aren’t Fixing Them — Backchannel. Between moonshots and randoms tests falls the shadow.

It can be curse or salvation. Here are blind spots in desperate need of light. As with so many other things, Google has shaped the way people view the tech industry’s pursuit of the future.
Biotech in the Garage. Much like the costs of sequencing the human genome,1 the cost of founding a biotech startup is dropping precipitously.2 If current trends continue, biotech companies will soon be founded in garages, funded off their founders’ credit cards.

The exact same trend that happened in software over the last decade and happened in hardware over the last 5 years or so is happening in biotech now. A smart software developer can build and launch a web or mobile app and get paying customers for under $2,000.
The Tech Industry Is In Denial, But The Bubble Is About To Burst. Euphoric reaction to superstar tech businesses is rampant — so much so that the tech industry is in denial about looming threats.

Keurig accidentally created the perfect business model for hardware startups. It’s no secret that investors don’t like hardware businesses.

Despite the eternal frustration of startup founders, investor distaste in physical product businesses is actually entirely logical. It’s nearly impossible to build a venture-scale business by selling dumb plastic parts at a 30% gross margin. But the connected, vertically integrated hardware products of today are very different than their dumb counterparts of yesterday. The difference is simple yet profound: it enables hardware businesses to operate with financials that mimic their SaaS brethren. Somewhat surprisingly, the most notable example of this type of business model was pioneered by Keurig, a company few people think of as a hardware business.

Background. No Money, No Time. The Man Who Quit Money: An Interview with Daniel Suelo. Bond crash across the world as deflation trade goes horribly wrong. A parallel drama is unfolding in America where the Pimco Total Return Fund has just revealed that it slashed its holdings of US debt to 8.5pc of total assets in May, from 23.4pc a month earlier.

This sort of move in the staid fixed income markets is exceedingly rare. The 10-year US Treasury yield - still the global benchmark price of money - has jumped 48 points to 2.47pc in eight trading sessions.
The perils of programmer education in the bazaar. There are an endless amount of learning resources available for software developers, and with that comes an infinite amount of noise. To help us isolate the signals we’re looking for, we use: social media, link aggregators, email-based newsletters, bookmarking services, web search, podcasts, tumblelogs, and anything else we can get our hands on.

It’s wonderful that these tools exist, it’s terrible that we have to rely on them. And how is all of this content produced, anyway? For there to be so much publishing activity, there has to be some force driving it. Love of learning and craft?
Are Millennials WAY More Prepared For The Future Than We Think?
We recently finished up an internship program within our company that consisted of 6 high school and 3 college students.
How to turn a liberal hipster into a capitalist tyrant in one evening. The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third.

After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start.
Edge.org. It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe inHooking Up: I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing.

It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stock broker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with.
Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers - Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers. It did not surprise me that almost every child in the D.C. public high school class raised a hand when I asked if any of them had been stopped and searched by the police.

When I told them that being stopped without reasonable suspicion that they were committing a crime is a violation of the United States Constitution, one of the students corrected me: “No, you don’t understand, these are the The term “jumpout” is slang in the D.C. area for infamous squads of armed police officers who conduct surprise “stop-and-frisk” maneuvers. See Nicole Flatow, If You Thought Stop-And-Frisk Was Bad, You Should Know About Jump-Outs, ThinkProgress (Dec. 11, 2014, 11:00 AM), [ not the police. They’re allowed to do that.” I’m used to people laughing in disbelief when I do constitutional rights trainings in heavily policed communities. But when I heard those words, my heart sank.
Why Do We Still Care About The Dow? : Planet Money. Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck — Basic income. Mind Training - Part 2. Game theory’s cure for corruption – Suzanne Sadedin. Negative Interest Rates May Spark Existential Crisis for Cash. JPMorgan Chase recently sent a letter to some of its large depositors telling them it didn’t want their stinking money anymore.

Our economies are messed up. And the cause is the Internet. — Bull Market. Imagine that someone told you that three of the biggest stories of the past few years — the financial crisis, exploding economic inequality, and the National Security Agency spy scandal — weren’t actually different stories at all.
14-11-044. Join the Engineering Leisure Class. When you want to make something new, there are three strategies Work within an existing organization: Whether it’s a government agency, a non-profit, or a corporation, working within an existing organization can give you the resources to attempt something big.

The limitations of this strategy are that (1) you can only pursue projects that fit the organization’s strategic goals and (2) as organizations get larger, they develop inertia that makes it hard to gather support for your idea — especially if it’s crazy.Form a startup: This is the glorious way to bring something new into the world.
"Information asymmetry" cuts both ways. They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. – A Soviet-era political joke according to Wikipedia, though I've only seen it in an English text describing the C++ object model.

Hiring the Other Half. Back Disclosure: I am a co-founder at OnboardIQ, a dashboard built for operations teams to screen and scale workforces. The supervillain’s guide to saving the internet. A 3-D View of a Chart That Predicts The Economic Future: The Yield Curve. To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home. The Housing Bubble and the Lesser Depression: Either the Very Sharp Dean Baker or I Am Hopelessly… — Bull Market.

A Cynic’s Guide To Fintech — Bull Market. Janitor Ronald Read Leaves Behind $8,000,000 Secret Fortune. Evan Soltas. Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s. The Drug That Is Bankrupting America
The problem of fake gold bars. Hookers turning Airbnb apartments into brothels. Capital One Fraud Researchers May Also Have Done Some Fraud. What the Wild Swiss Franc Appreciation Really Means. A Canadian City Once Eliminated Poverty And Nearly Everyone Forgot About It. How to Fight Corruption With Game Theory. Dear Evangelicals: You’re Being Had. The Art of Not Working at Work. A Utopia of One’s Own — Weird Future. Welcome to the Failure Age!
The Astonishing Weaponry of Dung Beetles.

Artmarcovici. Make Your Own World With Programmable Matter. Want a happy worker? Let robots take control.
The poisoned NUL byte, 2014 edition. The Mystery of Lofty Stock Market Elevations. Why the Robots Might Not Take Our Jobs After All: They Lack Common Sense. Inequality and Web Search Trends. A Mother’s Journey Through the Unnerving Universe of ‘Unboxing’ Videos. Scott Adams Blog: How to Make More Money in Stocks 08/04/2014. Boom: A Journal of California. Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks His New Stirling Engine Will Get You Off The Grid For Under $10K.

Dispute Between Amazon and Hachette Takes an Orwellian Turn. Meet the woman behind Ikea's living wage calculator. Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted. Harry Potter And The Cryptocurrency of Stars. The Danger of Financial Jargon. Near Miss: The Solar Superstorm of July 2012. A ‘nationwide gentrification effect’ is segregating us by education.

My (Half) Workday as a Turker. 15-Jul-2014 ~ Perfect Pilfering. Www.drewdavismedia.com/details.php?pid=1. What I mean when I say "I think VR is bad news".
My (Half) Workday as a Turker. Uber Makes Economists Sad. Are We Welcome Entrepreneurs or Unwanted Criminals?
The Left-Right Political Spectrum Is Bogus - Crispin Sartwell. Welcome To Extremistan! Please Check Your Career At The Door.
The Teaching Class by Rachel Riederer. How Do Hedge Funds Get Away With It? Eight Theories.